]]>London-based online currency transfer outfit TransferWise has raised a $58 million Series C round that was led by Andreessen Horowitz. This follows a $25 million Series B round just seven months ago, which included Virgin chief Richard Branson and original backer Peter Thiel (who are also in the current round, along with Index Ventures, IA Ventures and Seedcamp.) Like CurrencyFair over in Ireland, TransferWise uses cash reserves in various countries to bypass the banks and offer conversion rates that are far cheaper than those offered by traditional banks and remittance services. According to the Financial Times, Andreessen Horowitz won a competitive bidding process to invest in TransferWise, which is now valued at “close to $1 billion”.

The announcement came alongside a few new features for the 3D Robotics Iris+, such as the ability to have the quadcopter follow a GPS-equipped watch. One of the key differences between the Iris+ and last year’s Iris is “3PV Follow Me” mode, which keeps the drone’s gimbal-mounted camera trained on a user carrying a GPS-equipped Android phone or tablet.

]]>We’ve covered TransferWise quite a few times – along with one or two rivals such as CurrencyFair, the London-based financial technology startup offers a genuinely disruptive foreign exchange service that significantly undercuts the banks. Its backers apparently also continue to see great potential: having led TransferWise’s $6 million Series A round just over a year ago, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures has again participated in the firm’s $25 million Series B, alongside Index Ventures, Virgin boss Richard Branson, IA Ventures, TAG, and Le Monde owner Xavier Niel. TransferWise, run by former Skype director Taavet Hinrikus, says it will use the funds for marketing.

]]>Mysterious mobile payments startup Clinkle has had no trouble attracting both cash and tech celebrities to its cause. Now it’s stocking up on experience as well. The Palo Alto ‘stealth’ company announced on Tuesday it has hired former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy as its new COO.

McCarthy certainly brings industry expertise to the fledging company since many of the company’s employees – including its 22-year-old CEO Lucas Duplan – are being pulled directly out of Stanford University’s computer science department. McCarthy served as Netflix’s financial chief from 1999 to 2010, keeping the books during the video darling’s most rapid period of growth and its transformation into a streaming content giant as well as leading the Netflix’s IPO in 2002.

This time around McCarthy will be on board when his chosen company makes its first dollar. Clinkle hasn’t launched its first product yet. In fact, it’s given few details about what that product will actually be. We know Clinkle plans to enter the smartphone mobile payments space, challenging the likes of Google Wallet, Square Wallet and PayPal. We know Clinkle plans to start off focusing on college campuses. Everything else remains a mystery.

Whatever Clinkle has planned, McCarthy has swallowed the Kool-Aid, but he’s certainly not the only one. A dozen prominent investors, including Peter Thiel, Richard Branson and Andreessen Horowitz all lined up to back Duplan’s company, which raised an astonishing $25 million seed round. There’s something in Duplan’s PowerPoint pitch that’s causing both money and talent to jump on board. McCarthy was hardly modest in his own estimations of Clinkle’s potential.

“Clinkle is one of those rare Netflix-like opportunities, only bigger,” McCarthy said in a Clinkle statement. “Lucas has a grand vision for broad-scale disruption of a huge consumer market enabled by growth in mobile devices and brilliant software innovation. That’s why Clinkle has been funded by some of the smartest money in Silicon Valley and why I signed on to be Lucas’ partner.”

]]>The hype keeps building around Clinkle, a still-secretive Palo Alto mobile payments startup founded by 22-year-old Lucas Duplan. It’s already raised $25 million in seed funding from an impressive list of Silicon Valley backers, and that list just got even more impressive. Clinkle announced Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson has made a personal investment of an undisclosed amount in the company.

Despite the big spotlight, Clinkle hasn’t let on exactly what it plans to do. We know this: Clinkle is creating a mobile wallet that requires no special hardware on the phone (i.e. no NFC chip) nor at the point-of-sale – just software. Clinkle also plans on overcoming the problem of scale every mobile payments service faces by focusing on college and universities campuses, which tend to be insular environments.

That hardly sounds revolutionary, but Clinkle founder and CEO Duplan has hinted at some other technical element that is making people like Branson and Thiel go gaga at demos. TechCrunch and ValleyWag may have caught a whiff of that mystery technology from their sources. Both reported that Clinkle uses high-frequency sound to exchange information between phones and standard payment terminals, though TechCrunch later excised its post of the relevant graphs. It’s hard to say if these are anything more than rumors at this point.

In any case, investors aren’t the only ones getting excited about the wallet Clinkle plans to offer. Clinkle also announced today that it has a waiting list of 100,000 students at college campuses around the country signed up to download its mysterious app.

]]>In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself clicking on the headlines of business stories and expecting to head to a traditional media outlet’s website, only to find myself landing somewhere fairly new and unexpected: to the career-oriented pages of LinkedIn.

So in a sense, it seems like an odd fit that in the past few months, we’ve been writing more about LinkedIn becoming a media company. Between the acqusition of the new reader Pulse, the growth of LinkedIn Today (the company’s news feed on its homepage), and the launch of LinkedIn Influencers (the blogging platform for select users), there’s no doubt that it’s emerged as a serious place to go for your business news.

For a company that didn’t start out in the media business, it’s a funny direction to take. But with more than half of its business coming from the corporate recruiting product it sells to companies, a growing media business brings eyeballs and attention to the site, which in turn fuels data to the recruting side.

“We want to be the place you go in the morning to get the news and insight before you start your day, or the place you check in when you’re betweeen meetings,” said Ryan Roslansky, who is the head of content products for LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is making progress in that direction.

It’s worth asking, why exactly does LinkedIn want to become a media company? As we’ve written here at paidContent repeatedly, the state of online advertising is not a thriving business right now. While different companies are experimenting with things like targeted or sponsored advertising to support content, it’s still an uncertain future for digital publishers. AdAge wrote recently that LinkedIn is pitching companies on “sponsored updates,” or native advertising in its feed, as part of its growing media presence.

But still, revenue from advertising only made up 23 percent of LinkedIn’s total revevenue in the first quarter — the other 77 percent comes from subscriptions to LinkedIn’s premium product (20 percent of overall revenue), and Talent Solutions, the corporate recruiting products that companies purchase (a whopping 57 percent of total revenue.)

So even if LinkedIn is successful at introducing sponsored content within the news feed, it’s clear that Talent Solutions is the biggest money-maker for the company. The section brought in $184.3 million last quarter, an increase of 80 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012. And the key to Talent Solutions is generating data on the site.

Daniel Roth, Executive Editor at LinkedIn who oversees content on products like LinkedIn Today, speaks at paidContent Live 2013 in New York in April 2013. Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

As I’ve written previously, the company takes the information that consumers upload to their digital resumes and uses it to provide companies with suggestions and tools for hiring. These tools include allowing corporate recruiters and human resources employeees to post job ads, search for relevant candidates, track responses, and monitor candidates they’d want to hire.

“Content is a frequent use case. Members do check professional content to stay abreast of what’s going on in their industry,” Roslansky told me. “People come back to LinkedIn for the value proposition we offer, and the more frequently they come back, the more likely they are to subscribe to one or our premium services, or the more likely they are to update their profile.”

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/07/04/why-does-linkedin-want-to-be-a-media-company-its-all-about-the-data/feed/8Morgan Freeman, Richard Branson take to YouTube to oppose the war on drugshttps://gigaom.com/2012/11/29/breaking-the-taboo-youtube-release/
https://gigaom.com/2012/11/29/breaking-the-taboo-youtube-release/#commentsThu, 29 Nov 2012 19:25:16 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=589448Breaking the Taboo that will be released for free on the site next week. So far, their bid for attention seems to be working.

]]>Next week, the U.K.’s Sundog Pictures will release its documentary film Breaking The Taboo on YouTube , months before the film is scheduled to air on traditional TV. Breaking the Taboo is a film with a message, opposing the war on drugs, and it features a powerful lineup: The movie is being narrated by Morgan Freeman and features testimony by Bill Clinton as well as Jimmy Carter.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2vqpNT1kV4]

Sundog has been using short clips featuring billionaire Richard Branson, actress Kate Winslet, actor Gael Garcia Bernal and rapper Dizzie Rascal to draw attention to it ahead of its online release.

The strategy seems to be working: The official Breaking The Taboo YouTube channel has clocked more than 300,000 views since its launch on November 16. But why would Sundog release the entire film for free on YouTube ahead of its TV broadcast? I got in touch with the company to find out, and a spokesperson sent me the following response:

“We have decided to go with a YouTube release as the important thing for us as a company is not monetary gain but raising awareness and spreading the word on global issues — we aim to educate and inspire people and we can do that best through a free, social medium like YouTube where so many more people will be able to access it.”

The movie will be available for free for one month starting December 7. It is part of a larger campaign to change drug policy that has attracted support from a variety of people including Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox, Napster co-founder Sean Parker and Sting.

]]>Updated: Much-vaunted New York teaching startup Codecademy is taking on a new round of funding, adding Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins as investors — and raising $10 million to help it expand globally.

But even though the site has seen a breathless rise to prominence, the money isn’t just being used to keep the servers spinning while demand grows: it’s got ambitions too.

Ahead of an on-stage interview with me at LeWeb London on Tuesday, co-founder Zach Sims told me that the new funds “give us the ability to go international” — something useful given that 50 percent of the company’s user base already comes from outside the U.S.

And in a post on the company’s blog, he explains his belief that the latest investors are well-placed to help it achieve that expansion.

“A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures. Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them.”

“It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company… and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now.”

It’s actually the first investment from Index’s new €350 million early stage fund, but still, it’s only eight months since the business announced its last round of funding, a $2.5 million round from investors including Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s Crunchfund.

This time round Union Square is following up, with Index’s Saul Klein leading the round and KPCB’s Mary Meeker joining in too.

So what do they see in it?

Index’s Klein told me that he was excited by Codecademy for many reasons, but not least because “it’s not a content-needy educational publisher” but “a marketplace for students and teachers.”

He also pointed out that with a global depression, it made sense to back a company that gives people the chance to learn new skills and potentially find jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access.

That seems a proposition that is not just popular with VCs but also a magnet for billionaire tycoons: not only did Bloomberg express his support for the site, but investors include Russian Yuri Milner (who adds to his previous investment) and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

]]>After a month of rumors surrounding a funding round being picked up by mobile social networking startup Path, the company has finally closed the deal and officially announced that it has raised more than $30 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, and includes a number of other investors, including Sir Richard Branson. Other investors in the round: Greylock Partners, Jerry Murdock, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures, Mark Pincus, Yuri Milner and Allen & Company.

Here’s a handy quote attributed to Path founder Dave Morin:

“We are delighted to announce that last week we closed a significant round of funding with a new set of investor partners. It is important to us to work with investment partners who share common values around quality and building for the long term. Our “Path” has only just begun, and we are looking forward to continuing to bring world-class design and simplicity to the world of mobile personal networking.”

And here’s a link to the blog post by Redpoint announcing why it led the investment in Path. Among other reasons, it was because the firm was “struck by the combination of audacious vision, intellect, product sense, leadership, humor and modesty of Dave Morin and the design brilliance that Dustin Mierau brings to Path.”

I’m terribly happy for Dave Morin and co.: After all, Path is one of the few apps that I use every day and keep on the home screen of my iPhone. But Om has a bit more tempered view of Path’s potential success. Check out his story on why Path is no Instagram here.

]]>Richard Branson is no stranger to investing in mobile media: among his more notable moves have been establishing *Virgin Mobile* years ago, and more recently moving into iPad publishing with Project magazine. Today comes news of his latest foray into the wireless world: an investment in the mobile payments startup Square.

Press releases from Virgin and Square do not give any indication of how much money Branson has invested in the company, which was started by Twitter founder and (current) executive chairman Jack Dorsey. We have contacted Square, Dorsey and Branson to ask and will update this post as we learn more.

Square raised $100 million at the end of June in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the time, that valued the company at $1 billion.

Square built a business initially on an iPhone-based mobile payments service that is now avaialbe for both iOS and Android devices. It provides a square-shaped dongle to merchants, who can plug the device into a phone to make instant card transactions. Some 800,000 merchants in the U.S. are now using the dongles, and there are around $2 billion in payments processed annually through the platform. At the standard 2.75 percent commission that Square charges merchants, that works out to annuals revenues of $55 million from those transactions going to Square.

Last week, the company upgraded its payment app, Card Case, which now uses geofencing technology built into smartphones to let a user make purchases without even presenting the device. About 20,000 merchants have signed up to work with the Card Case app to date.

How will Richard Branson’s investment in Square figure in the company’s strategy? It seems unlikely that Branson has taken an interest in Square as a simple financial investment. Rather, Branson could prove to be a key figure for Square as it looks to make its payment services more ubiquitous.

Square has said it plans to launch in international markets in 2012, and Branson’s international Virgin empire could help with that.

Not only does Virgin operate national and international airlines, but it has a number of other travel interests, including train services in the UK. It also runs a number of financial services, as well as gyms, mobile operators and a pay-TV company: all opportunities to increase the number of Square transactions and give more exposure to the brand on a global basis.